Most development and promotion activity happens in the Integration stage.
The process is largely identical to Pipelines today as outlined here (up until the Next steps: after a feature has made it to Prod).
Working with feature branches
Teams can:
Create feature branches directly from
developin their personal or shared sandboxes.Link Jira/ADO tickets to feature branches.
Commit changes and create a pull request (PR) back into
develop.
PR creation works similarly to existing Pipelines, but with an important difference:
💡There are no promotion branches in Gitflow. The expanded branching model uses promotion branches to isolate feature branches and prevent pollution (largely due to merge conflict resolution) as they move through environments.
Gitflow does not require this because feature branches only merge back into develop, never downstream into multiple environment branches.
Promoting pull requests
Gearset provides the same automated checks available in Pipelines today:
Merge conflict checks
Validation deployments
Running Apex tests
Third-party test integrations
Respecting VCS review and approval rules
Viewing commits, files and linked tickets
Once checks and reviews are complete, users promote the PR to the static integration environment to integrate their changes with other in-flight work.
💡In Gitflow, **developer sandbox updates are triggered when a PR merges into your designated integration/develop branch**, not main as in the expanded model.
When PRs are promoted, the counter on the right side of the Integration environment increases to show how many merged PRs are waiting for the next release:
Creating a Release
To open a release, you can:
Select the PR indicator to the right of the Integration stage, or
Select the Integration environment and open the Release creation tab.
This shows you all the pending features for your next release.
💡If you see the commit that Gearset made when populating your repo, please write us a message in #proj-gitflow as this should not happen.
The next article will describe about how to select PRs for the release.